Photo of the Day May 4th

I completed my pantry organizing project today as planned. As I mentioned yesterday I have far too many bags of herbs, spices, mixes, teas, grains and just about everything else you can think of... I love shopping at the bulk store, but have come to hate the fact that my pantry is a mess of bags. I finally decided to bite the bullet and start using some of my under-utilized canning jars for storage. I know I may regret it when I want to make jam this summer, but at this point my immediate needs had to take precedence so I used about 20 of them for dry goods storage. Chris picked up a wax pencil from the hardware store for us to label the jars and in just over an hour I went from daily annoyance to delightful organization. It does make me wonder why I took so long to finally deal with it though - it seems a shame to have lived with it for so long when it took so little time to fix.

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Photo of the Day May 3rd

I felt like super-woman today... leaping tall buildings in a single bound. After all the hard work of putting together the newsletter this past weekend I treated myself to a lovely breakfast out with my friend Cheryl, which simply sped by in a rush of conversation and excellent omelettes. After heading home I started working on a small organizational job that's been bugging me for a while - my pantry is home to far too many bags of things from the bulk store that just sit there in their little plastic bags spilling out of the door whenever I open it. I decided to decorate up some of the coffee tins I've been saving so I can use them for helpful, stacking, and quite attractive storage (above). I think they look great, and will make it so much easier for me to find things when I'm looking for them! Tomorrow I plan to tackle the rest of the pantry, but for the rest of today I helped host a planning meeting for the next issue of the newsletter, and shortly after I arrived home I got a call from a representative of the Thames Valley Parent Involvement Council, letting me know that my application to join the organization as a Parent Representative had been accepted. I'm excited to get to know more about not only the Thames Valley District School Board but it's parent engagement focuses, and I think that the more I know and learn in these areas the better I can help serve our school community. In a further effort in that direction, I spent this evening with my School Council Co-Chair at a TVDSB meeting outlining changes to several grant policies as well as the new Food and Beverage policy that will take effect in about a year. There are some big (and very positive) changes afoot in terms of what you can and cannot sell on school property - and although I think Tecumseh is already at the forefront of making healthy choices on our student's behalf, I can still see challenges coming. But what do I actually want to see coming? My pillow at this point - I'm exhausted from all that leaping of tall buildings (or, at least attending of meetings and organizing of pantries!)

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Photo of the Day May 2nd

After many, many hours of work, the Firebird newsletter is done for yet another month. I should clarify that what we produce for the school isn't a traditional newsletter - it's actually a mini newspaper, complete with calendars, reviews, photo galleries and more. It's certainly one of the most thorough school newsletters I've seen, and it acts as one of the school's primary communication tools - anyone reading the newsletter ends up with a great understanding of activities and plans for almost every area of the school. When "the beast" was done I needed to get a copy to my newsletter partner (and great friend) Julie, who has the technical prowess and proper software to convert it from Word to PDF so we can send it off to the school... along the way my I-have-so-much-work-to-do stress dissolved and I actually got a good look at the beautiful springlike world around me for the first time this weekend. Cherry blossoms in full bloom, blue skies, sunshine, and birds singing to help wind down the weekend... exactly what I needed to break myself out of my computer-based rut. Thank you mother nature!

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Photo of the Day May 1st

May already - who could believe it? As usual, this first Saturday of May was spent at the market - and because this weekend also happens to fall just before the release of the school's most recent issue of the newsletter, the rest of the day was spent with me hard at work formatting articles and conceiving layouts. Rather than post a "photo of the day" of me working, I thought another nod to last night's Community School dinner was in order. An element of the dinner that I neglected to mention yesterday was the short theatrical production that opened the evening - students from the German Language School of London performed a dialogue about the rise and fall of the Berlin wall to help give some insight into part of Germany's torn history. It was a visually simple but dramatic way to illustrate an important part of the countries history, and a creative way to start off an evening of conversation and kinship...

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Photo of the Day April 30th

Chris, Sophie and Batman play a game of kickball in the yard

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After a busy day playing ball with Batman (Rowan, who wore his mask for the larger part of today), Chris and I got ready to enjoy the third annual Multicultural Friendship Dinner at Tecumseh this evening. The yearly event partners one of London's distinct cultural communities with the school to prepare and serve a meal while learning a bit more about our global neighbours. In previous years we enjoyed the food and kinship of members of the local Muslim community as well as representatives from several Caribbean nations and Pakistan - this year the local German community took centre stage. Attendees at the dinner (and there were at least 200 of us) sat along three harvest-style tables and enjoyed schnitzel, potato salad, pasta and some delicious German desserts while getting to know members of not only the German community but several of our own "Old South" neighbours as well. It's a great community building event on both a small and large scale, and something that I hope Tecumseh Community School continues for years to come... Congratulations to Fabienne and the entire Community School team for another job well done!

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Photo of the Day April 29th

With Chris sleeping during the day today I tried to spend the lions share of my time out of the house - I spent the morning running around attending doctor's appointments, going to the drug store and for groceries, then picked up Sophie from school and hit the gym. After a "smoothie break" together post-workout, Sophie asked if we could do something else fun before going home. It's been a while since she had her bangs trimmed, so we decided to head to Max and Oscars for a haircut... it may not seem like haircut is a fun destination, but at children's haircutting places it sure is. Balloons, cartoons, cool cars to sit in instead of regular chairs - it's a lot different than my salon that's for sure. As you can tell, Sophie was very excited to get started - and we were both pleased with the results. As an added bonus, Chris was awake by the time we got home so we didn't feel as though our noise around the house detracted from his rest in any way. It can be a real challenge when one person in a household sometimes works on such dramatically different schedules than the rest of the house, but we seem to make it work.

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Photo of the Day April 28th

What a full house today! My cousin Heather and her fiancée Shawn drove down to London for the day with their daughter Alexis so we could visit and talk about wedding invitations. I'm making their wedding stationary as a gift to them, and we needed to work out some of the final details on fonts, wording, decorative elements, and so on... I wasn't sure whether we would get much done with a house full of kids, but once Rowan and Alexis went down for their respective naps we were able to power through a whole lot of decision making. Now I have to start cutting paper... lots, and lots, and lots of paper. Wish me luck!

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Photo of the Day April 27th

The sink after a teeth-brushing may be messy, but at least she did it all by herself!

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Over the past while we've been working with Sophie to help her become more independent, and it's been a bit of a struggle. She loves being babied, and if given the choice would like me to still dress her, brush her teeth, help her on with her shoes, do up her coat, and so on. Honestly, she'd still like me to feed her the way we did when she was a baby - we really had to put our foot down on that one because otherwise I would still be holding her spoon for her to this day. One of the ways Chris has been encouraging her independence was with something that he created called her "Star Chart". It hangs on the fridge and has about a dozen things on it that we're trying to encourage her to do for herself, from "I brushed my own teeth" to "I got into my PJ's at bedtime". Each time she does one of these things we draw a star in the column next to the activity - there are 20 columns in total, so once she's done each activity 20 times the column will be full. Once the entire sheet is full, she gets a special prize - Chris let her choose the prize herself and she decided she really wanted to go to Canada's Wonderland. It should take her a large part of the summer to get 20 of each activity done (especially the one about "washing your hair without complaining"), but I imagine that by August we'll have a good reason to spend the day at Wonderland - and I'm really looking forward to celebrating Sophie's independence with her.

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Photo of the Day April 26th

Those Barbie dolls I dressed up a few days ago took centre stage today (oh, the pun!) when Chris, Sophie and I put on a fashion show. We created a runway across the dining room table complete with stage and pot lights (Sophie's idea by the way), and once the "Audience Barbies" were seated the models strutted their stuff. Chris acted as judge, and after our group of four creatively dressed models walked the runway he crowned the one in the purple dress the winner... luckily there were no cat fights or drama-filled confrontations back stage (this isn't America's Next Top Model after all!)

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Photo of the Day April 25th

I tried a recipe from my favourite magazine today. I've been hooked on Country Living for a couple of years now... it's one of the few (okay, the only) magazine that I will read literally from cover to cover every month, and this month one of the features in the recipe section was about different meals you could create in a cast iron pan. I was intrigued by the Potato Cake with tart apples and Jarlsberg so decided to serve it up with a green salad for tonight's supper. It was pretty easy to make and quite yummy, although the mild flavours (yes, even the tart apples didn't seem that tart once they were baked) made it seem like more of a side-dish than a main. Luckily for us, we're having a dinner that calls for a starchy side tomorrow, so our left overs will be well used.

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